Creating teacher capacity in Early Childhood Education and Care institutions implementing an authoritative adult style

The study investigates the opportunities and challenges that arose among kindergartens in the implementation of the national Being Together (BT) programme. A key BT question focused on preventing social and emotional problems and building social skills in children between the ages of 1-5 years old, through the use of an authoritative adult style in kindergarten.

The analysis identifies five success criteria in the implementation of the BT programme: a strong commitment to the authoritative adult style, a strong focus on the implementation process, well-developed support systems, involved leaders and a collective orientation. These criteria resulted in a shared vision and an academically grounded practice in the kindergartens. The combination of professional training and guidance in the kindergartens, through collective collaboration, led to changes in established practice among the staff and a noticeable reduction in challenging behaviour among the children. The author of the article believes that the most important criterion for the successful BT implementation was the strong focus on implementation drivers in the change process, and emphasises that it is necessary to strengthen the kindergarten teachers’ understanding of implementation processes in order for them to master future innovations in kindergartens.

The sample consists of project groups in seven kindergartens from seven Norwegian municipalities that participated in the implementation of the BT programme. The project groups were interviewed both before the implementation and one year later. The empirical source data consists of focus group interviews with the project groups responsible for introducing the programme into each kindergarten, semi-structured interviews with the project group supervisors and in-depth interviews with the project managers who developed the BT programme.

Omdal, H. (2018). “Creating teacher capacity in Early Childhood Education and Care institutions implementing an authoritative adult style”. Journal of Educational Change, 19(1):103–129.